Saturday, October 16, 2010

COHA, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, has a site with a report by Melissa Graham, "Mexico’s New War: Sex Trafficking". That's right, it's not just about drugs anymore. These women wind up in the US, and the results are not nice.

In one example, the police in Plainfield, New Jersey reported a raid upon a sex slave house described as a “19th-Century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, morning-after pills, and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion.”4 Women are placed into such brothels on both sides of the border and subjected to multiple sexual acts a day, living in fear that if they do not comply with their captor’s demands they, or their family, will be killed. Women and girls trafficked into the United States are thus dispersed across the country, making this an issue that is much more than just a border problem.

Elsewhere, on the other side of the pond, the NYTimes has an article by Suzanne Daley, "Rescuing Young Women From Traffickers’ Hands", that reads like Ringo's Kildar.